Thursday, June 27, 2013

It Died a Virgin

Out in the fizz pop crackle world
of the internet, where every move, right and wrong, occupies a corner of
infinity, can something ever truly die?Can
blogs die?I hope so, because the death
of something is an affirmation of its life.For something to die means it had to have been living, had a
body that breathed, wandered, giggled, fought and loved.By killing my blog, lipstickeater, here and
now, I hope to give it the flesh it always deserved.And hopefully, a non-Christian, non-mystic,
but witchy reality of afterlife.The
text pieces that are amassed here on this blogspot domain ain’t going nowhere,
and by the very stillness of their stasis they form the flesh of a body that
you and I can now confirm did inhale and exhale.These words are the long white flowers I am laying
at the grave of lipstickeater.blogspot.com.

Five years ago, I began writing in/
as lipstickeaterto stabilize the
vulnerable molecules of my own body.I
was two years into being a gay divorcée, trying to figure out how and if I was going
to be able to maintain being a femme without a butch husband: I had to learn to
be tautologically feminine.At the same
time, I had recently, impulsively, brought to end a two-year negotiation with a
prestigious university press over the publication of a book, a version of my
doctoral thesis on black femininity. I
wanted to write a book that changed the direction of not only queer theory but
also the discourse of critical theory itself.I wrote purposefully in a chatty, gossipy voice; my footnotes were
minimal because I believed that citations should be functional, referring only
to work with which one actually engaged, rather than an bloated but dribbly farce of academic rigor.(Anyone can do a
JSTOR search and plug in citations for a billion footnotes.)But the reviewers engaged by the press saw my
aesthetic and conceptual choices as either laziness or inability (probably
both) and in their rejections of the manuscript, condescendingly harped on my need to change my rainbowbabywoman into
something other than what it was.Mainly: books they had written.Don’t
believe their progressive poses: academic theorists, and particularly queer
theorists, love to live the Oedipal narrative.My book was not a traditional academic book; its title is rainbowbabywoman, for fuck’s sake. But the
editor agreed with them, and like a girl who had gone on too many dates with a
guy who fucked her hard while telling her she’s ugly, I decided to stop
revising and submitting to that press.So there I was, a single femme, an unpublished academic, still furiously feminist, but the body that had
to hold those identities, my body, was just a cloud of electrons going quickly
to ash.

I am stretched next to the white
flowers over this grave.I always
thought that writing could hold together my too disappearing flesh.Ever since I was a child, I’ve been writing
because I can’t sing, dance, or get pregnant.I was a frontwoman without a band, a failed ballet dancer, and a transsexual who doesn’t believe transsexual surgery can solve my problems.When I entered graduate school in 1997, I was
determined to write a book that would not only express my particular tangle of
racial and gender identities (I’ve always felt myself to be a black girl
trapped in an Asian gay male’s body; I’ve been a feminist since I was 12 years
old) but turn my own psyche into a live test for the theories of performativity
which is my formal training. rainbowbabywoman was to be a performance
of the performativity of race and gender.I laid out a detailed phenomenology of cross-identification, showing that to embody the race and gender
that you are not requires a rigorous ethics of emotional, political and
physical positions.But this wasn’t just an
idea; it was me, my body.

The magic of these white flowers is
that roots regenerate from their snipped feet, like lizards.Eventually I left rainbowbabywoman gasping in its shoebox, and decided to write new
theories through a blog.I did so not
because I wanted to give my sentences a consolation prize but because I sensed
a certain kind of freedom and opportunity in digitalia as not platform, but medium of writing. When a painter finishes a painting, it begins
to exist.If she has a gallery behind
her and has a show or sells the thing, hooray, but she doesn’t have to have a
show or sell in order for the painting to have a bodily integrity.Whether anyone wants it or not, the finished painting
simply is.In direct contrast, a writer’s
work doesn’t exist unless it is desired, not by a person, but people who proxy
for conglomerates.I’ve always found
this to be profoundly unfair: my text pieces were always my girls, my
daughters, my guardian fairies the moment I tapped the last period into being. Then suddenly, with the advent of digitalia,
it was suddenly possible for my textual pieces to become the little paintings
they’ve always wanted to be. Lipstickeaterwas born. Blogspot allowed me to fuse text making to the labor of creating a body for myself.To evoke my beloved Félix Guattari, it is an assemblage of my feminist
femininity.It taught me so much: to be
fearless in vulnerability, to write and think quickly, to produce a rhythmic body
of work rather than one ur-text, to
believe in the power of the immaterial to accomplish material things.

I wore white to match the white
flowers.I feel like a widow although
it’s only a tail of me that’s died.If
I’ve been slowing down on writing in/ as lipstickeater, it’s because its flesh
has been gradually congealing into its own infinite objectness.I am always going to be all about femininity
and feminism, but my daily body craved other forms. I’m working on a book-length piece about pure
feminism.I want to think big, to write
a manifesta, a daintier sequel to The
Second Sex.One might call it The Fourth Sex.I call it Artificial
Menstruation.I also completed a
book of stories and named her Lace Sick
Bag. I’ve been supremely lucky to work with my new feminine feminist
heroes, Patricia No and Antonia Pinter of Publication Studio Portland, who will
bring Lace Sick Bag out in early
September.In terms of taking my digital
prosemaking to the next level, I’m most proud of this collaboration because Publication
Studio is doing the kind of work that is going to be the future of books.When they publish a book, it is tripartite: an
e-book, a free digital reading copy uploaded to their reading commons that can
be annotated by readers, and a hand-made physical book.They are turning books into electron
clouds.With their reading commons, they
are infusing the often cold bodylessness of the internet with the tactile intimacy
of touching a book.And in elegantly
converse symmetry, their production of the physical book is informed by the digital model of commerce and object-production.The beautiful physical books are produced on
demand: the book only comes into its paper body after a reader purchases it
over the Publication Studio e-shop. The traditional publishing model is
clunkily capitalistic: gobs of books are published, and then hawked to a public
in whom desire must be whipped up, like pounds of cheap and
cheaply-made clothes so desperate at H&M.The
physical books at Publication Studio are never wasted, never have to fear a
death in remainder bins or cold dark storage, because they germinate from the
reader’s desire.

The words I’ll be writing from now
on will sit at girlscallmurder.com.Lipstickeater is dead, but maybe someday it'll come back to life. But the good thing about being dead is that you
can now become a ghost!Lipstickeater
will keep appearing at its whim on girlscallmurder, in its new ethereal form: hashtag.
I’m laying lipstickeater deep into the
grave, but its desire keeps wafting up like a heavy perfume: the desire to
hover, be granular, dissipate. It
creates a desire in me, too.I make
myself ready to be haunted, and my digital skin is growing pores like
uteri.I’m holding white flowers in
mourning but I’m looking up at you because the earth is not where the body of
lipstickeater is; it’s in you, out there, in the fizz crackle pop world of sparks
and want.

About Me

I’m a girl who loves red lipstick... oh, sorry...I sometimes forget...I’m a boy who loves red lipstick, a boy who also loves to love boys. But I’m also a Korea-born, Midwest-bred, Virginia-groomed, Bay Area-harvested faggotte who is above all a black feminist.